My income had always been insecure... Apple Tree Yard made me less poor
Louise Doughty talks to HANNAH STEPHENSON about why she set her latest novel at Peterborough Railway Station...
THERE’S been a buzz around Platform Seven, bestselling author Louise Doughty’s ninth novel, and not just because her latest chilling tale is narrated by a ghost whose mysterious death forms the main strand of the story.
Louise, 55, had been a moderately successful novelist for 20 years until the BBC adaptation of her thriller Apple Tree Yard, starring Emily Watson and Ben Chaplin, catapulted her to fame and enabled her to become a full-time writer.
Up until then, she had supplemented her income by teaching creative writing, penning newspaper columns and occasional broadcasting.
While her previous novels had been reviewed well and nominated for prizes, it wasn’t until Apple Tree Yard that she became more successful commercially.
“It made me less poor,” she clarifies, smiling. “I still have a mortgage the size of a planet. What is the most boring thing I could have
done with the money? I took out a pension.
“My income had been so insecure my whole life. When you have a good piece of luck you make yourself secure. Maybe I would need another big success to feel I could spend any of it.”
That may be just around the corner, as Platform Seven has been optioned by a production company keen to bring it to the small screen.
It’s centred largely in and around the eponymous platform of Peterborough Railway Station, a bleak, cold setting inspired by her own experience of having to wait on many occasions at the station for a connection (from Leeds and East Anglia, where she went to university) to Rutland in the East Midlands, where her family lived.
“For the whole of my adult life, Peterborough Railway Station has been the transition place between the various stages of my life and my childhood.
“I’ve spent a lot of time there on cold winter nights with the wind blowing across the fens. I used to joke that if I’d have been really bad and died and gone to purgatory, I would find myself trapped on Peterborough Railway Station.”
Which is exactly where her deceased heroine Lisa Evans finds herself, caught in limbo, a troubled soul unable to escape the location or circumstances of her violent death until her soul finds peace.
“I don’t believe in ghosts but I believe that they are real for people who believe in them,” Louise muses.
When the novelist’s own mother died in 2014, just before she started the novel, Louise certainly felt her mum’s presence when she was clearing the house.
“The house still smelled of her and gradually that drifts away. And I can vividly remember the first time I went when I thought, ‘She’s not here anymore’. It was something quite practical about smell and sense and the unoccupied house.
“It did spook me... That all fed into Platform Seven.”
“It’s ironic that I decided to write a novel set at Peterborough Railway Station at the point when my parents had both died and I no longer needed to go there,” she adds.
Lisa’s is not the only death in the novel – in her ghostly state she witnesses another fatality at the station and questions arise among the living as to whether the two deaths are connected. Meanwhile, her life before her demise gradually unfolds to reveal how she died.
This explores the other main strand of the novel, namely her coercive control relationship with a man who on the outside seems completely fine, but definitely isn’t.
Psychological manipulation and ‘gaslighting’ (where an abuser manipulates information to make a victim question his or her sanity) all feed into the plot.
“Accidentally, it couldn’t be more current,” Louise observes. “Coercive control is very much in the air at the moment.”
Has she ever been a victim of that? “Let’s just say, I’ve had some relationships that I wouldn’t want to repeat,” she says. “There probably isn’t a woman alive of my generation that hasn’t been in a relationship with controlling elements.
“I’m 55 and if you think of the mores I was raised by, I can remember there was still pressure for the kind of Heathcliff myth... that someone being possessive was romantic, that you should be pleased.
“We are a lot more sophisticated now in our view of relationships.”
The daughter of an engineer,
Louise was raised in a working-class family in Rutland in the East Midlands. Her father left school at the age of 13 but went to night school and got a PhD in his 50s.
“He spent his whole life trying to educate himself. Me and my brother and sister were the first generation in either family to go to university.”
Today, she lives in London with her partner, a BBC radio producer she met many years ago when Louise was reviewing books, plays and films.
“We’ve never got round to the marrying bit. I moved in with my partner when I was 32 and we have two children together.
“Marriage never interested me. I never felt the need and I’m quite proud of that. It used to really depress me in my 30s the way the obsession with getting married still seemed so current.
“It made me a bit anti (marriage). I’ve got the whole package. I’ve got the big mortgage, the garden shed and the two kids (daughters aged 22 and 17). They still live at home.”
Louise was associate producer on the set of Apple Tree Yard, went on set and met the stars on numerous occasions. She thought they did a brilliant job.
“Emily Watson was amazing. Once we got her, I knew we were home and dry... I have a tremendous girl crush on her.”
As for the future, she’s already working on her new novel. And, as executive producer of Platform
Seven, Louise is no doubt hoping to keep that pension pot topped up.
I’m 55 and if you think of the mores I was raised by... I can remember there was still immense pressure for the kind of Heathcliff myth... that someone being possessive was romantic...